SmokingDog
Well-Known Member
Would a high mash temp and accidently prolonged mash time produce a high FG?
Mashed at 159-60 for about 125 mins.
My FG isnt dropping below 1.031. OG was 1.073
High Temp - kinda what I thought. English nut honey brown. Now a fairly "SWEET" version.
OPINIONS:
Should I bother spending the time to bottle, or just dump it in a keg and drink it. I think I will dry hop a little to balance some of the sweetness though. (I think I jsut answered my own question! HA.)
... your North Icelandic Brown
high temp - yes at around 70-76C you will get a lot of dextrins and less fermentable sugars. This is how low alcohol beers are mashed. B amylase is active which will produce unfermenatable dextrins mostly.
Long time will help produce more fermentable extract but important to mash at lower temps eg 64C and 72C stands for max fermentable extract
It seems to me that mashing at a high temperature for a long time should eventually make a very fermentable wort. Eventually the enzymes should break down all the starches and dextrins to simple (and very fermentable) sugars. It just might take a long time.
I'll just throw my thought process down in case I'm really wrong.
Our grains are made up of many long chain starches. We can think of a starch as a necklace of sugar units linked together. If we say that one sugar unit is an S then we can say that a typical starch looks like SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.
The enzymes at low temperatures go along and cleave off a sugar from the end of the starch. The enzymes at higher temperatures randomly cleave the starch at any point along the chain.
Mashing at low temperatures SSSSS => S + SSSS => S + S + SSS => S + S + S + SS => S + S + S + S + S
We can see that mashing at a low temperature will only give us simple sugars if we mash to completion.
Mashing at high temperatures SSSSS => SS + SSS => S + SS + SS => S + S + S + SS => S + S + S + S + S
Mashing at a high temperature will quickly convert long starch molecules to dextrins. Eventually these dextrins should be converted to simple sugars.
Mashing at an intermediate temperature will give the fastest conversion to simple sugars. At these temperatures the long starch molecules are quickly cleaved randomly along the chain by the enzymes most active at high temperatures. This creates a lot of "chain ends" which are quickly attacked by the enzymes that work at low temperatures.
I don't have a ton of experience with mashing at different temperatures but it seems from the scientific side of things, you can get to a very fermentable wort anywhere between 140-160F however it might take significantly longer than any of us would expect if you are outside of the 149-155F sweet spot most of us work in.
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